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spammimic

There are terrific tools (like PGP and GPG) for encrypting your mail. If somebody along the way looks at the mail they can't understand it. But they do know you are sending encrypted mail to your pal.

The answer: encode your message into something innocent looking.

Your messages will be safe and nobody will know they're encrypted!

There is tons of spam flying around the Internet. Most people can't delete it fast enough. It's virtually invisible. This site gives you access to a program that will encrypt a short message into spam. Basically, the sentences it outputs vary depending on the message you are encoding. Real spam is so stupidly written it's sometimes hard to tell the machine written spam from the genuine article.

This is a field known as Natural Language Steganography. SPAM is only one method of hiding messages in natural language. There is a project at Purdue University, for example, that is working on a method to hide messages in translated documents here. The inaccuracies present in an electroniacally translated document are used to hide the message.

I have also seen prototypes which hide the message in an apparent love letter, business communications, legal documents, and so forth.

It is still a field very much in its infancy, and as such, I wouldn't trust it, althought it is a very good academic exercise.

The one problem with using an online source to encode your message is that the enemy will have the algorithm you used to encode it, making it very easy to identify and decrypt. To make even somewhat reliable, you must be able to run it locally and change the stego algorithm enough so that it does not resemble those already publicly available.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to break setgonography techniques which are made public, try running OutGuess's StegBreak against images you can find on UseNet. You might be surprised at how easy it it to crack this stuff.

Be careful what you trust.

Government is like fire - a handy servant, but a dangerous master - George Washington
Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force. - George Washington.

Nice post Striek,though I'd just like to point out that Outguess doesnt always pick images which necessarily have hidden messages in them,it merely points out if there've been any changes,resulting in a large number of false positives.